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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   35662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Seeing people use Excel for tasks which would clearly call for a programming language is like seeing a six-year-old who insists the he does not need to learn his letters because he can just chat with unicode symbols.

Well, not necessarily. You're missing:

  • Distribution, guaranteed compatibility, and common UI/UX; all you need to run an Excel spreadsheet and the calculations contained therein is an Excel VM (usually, but not necessarily, made by Microsoft)
  • Zero overhead to pick up and use, everyone knows how to interact with a program made in Excel simply by pointing and clicking, which means lots of things you'd normally have to implement in more advanced languages are done for you (UI, saving/loading, the functions themselves)
  • Ease of observing, debugging, and tracing functions and program state (it's all out in the open, and the input-to-output function chains can be made as terse or as expansive as you want it to be)
  • Ease of printing data (to a screen or a physical page), which in other programming languages needs a bunch of iteration and string-conversion to work correctly

The best programming language is ultimately the one you know how to use right now, and "office worker gets bored, automates themselves" is [or once was] a valid career path. Sure, Excel stops being a viable option once you need to do things like talk to a network (which, totally coincidentally, Microsoft has an intermediate-level programming language called Access that can use Excel sheets as a frontend), and once you outgrow Access you're really in trouble (mainly because now you've created a problem for programmers to solve, and so now you're going to have to pay for the bootstrapping that Excel/Access did for you)... but most people don't get that far anyway.

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